Chapter Fifty-Nine
Thomas stole quietly away from the open window of his parents’ bedroom, awed and shocked. He had heard every word of his mother and father’s conversation. Unable to sleep, he had gone out onto the verandah and taken a chair by his room to watch the sun rise on another uncertain day when he’d heard his father cry out. He’d jumped up to go to them, but his mother’s voice had stopped him. Apparently, his father had been in the throes of a bad dream.
To make sure he was all right, Thomas had hung close to their window, open to allow in the last cold air before the spring turned warm and invited mosquitoes. His father was fifty-five and showing the distress of the past months. A year ago, the jeweler in town, the same age as his father, had died in bed next to his wife, the strain of a nightmare too much for his heart.
His poor father had reason to suffer nightmares, Thomas thought. The events of the last months had taken their toll. Silas Toliver’s pleas to the Texas legislature and his friends of influence to oppose secession continued to go unheard. February first, Texas became the seventh state to join the newly formed nation calling itself the Confederate States of America, shortened to the Confederacy for brevity’s sake. His father’s old friend, Governor Sam Houston, had been deposed from office after he locked himself in the basement of the capitol building in Austin and refused to come out to sign the papers authorizing separation from the union . Contrary to the opinions of the Tolivers’ aghast friends, his father had tirelessly supported the governor’s views of the state’s inevitable fate if removed from the teat that nourished it. He’d been sickened to his soul when public opinion turned against Sam Houston and forced the hero of San Jacinto, the man to whom the state owed so much, to withdraw from government service and retire to his farm in Huntsville, Texas.
Still his father had persisted in trying to convince anyone who would listen that the South was outmanned, outgunned, and outmatched. Typical of the reception of his views, in a town meeting called to discuss the wisdom of secession and the consequences of an armed conflict, one farmer dared to demand of the prominent Silas Toliver, “Why should we listen to you? For years you said there would be no war.”
“That was before Mr. Lincoln was elected,” his father countered. “Listen to reason,” he’d begged. “Only a third of the population in Texas owns slaves. Why should a few dictate the course that will involve the rest of the state in economic ruin and the waste of life to support a cause bound to be lost?”
Boos and hisses had answered his pleas. No less polite had been the reaction from other planters when his father had encouraged them to follow his plan to save Somerset from destruction should the slaves be emancipated. To a man, they believed the South would succeed as a nation. No Northern president would have a say in the rights of the Confederacy’s citizens to hold slaves. Great Britain and France would come in on the side of the Southern states in case of war, and the United States would back off. Those two great European countries were dependent on the region’s cotton, and to produce cotton, slaves were a necessity. In no way would they tolerate the disruption of their vital import by Mr. Lincoln’s Congress.
Thomas had seen his father pale at these optimistic assumptions. “Don’t the fools know that cotton agents in London have warned that England has a stockpile of cotton in their warehouses, whereas much of Europe’s wheat harvests have suffered?” he would moan. “Great Britain is far more dependent on the North’s grain than they are on the South’s cotton!”
His father’s anti-separatist stand, coupled with his mother’s long-known views on slavery, had made the Toliver family all but social pariahs. To his father’s great disappointment, he was not re-elected to the city council. Parents withdrew their children from his mother’s Young People’s Reading Group. Only their status as first settlers and city founders and the steadfast friendships of the DuMonts and Warwicks prevented them from being cast totally out of Howbutker society. Henri DuMont and Jeremy Warwick wielded such economic power and influence in the county—indeed, in the whole state—that none dared to exclude the Tolivers from their guest lists—not that their invitations would have been accepted anyway.
The cruelest charge—and the one that disturbed Thomas the most—had been the allegation from Lorimer Davis that Silas Toliver had gone crazy from anxiety that in case of war, his son and only heir would be killed. No one need listen to him, the planter declared. Parental alarm and fear that Somerset would pass into oblivion were his sole reasons for opposing secession.
Tonight, drawing away from his parents’ window, Thomas was forced to believe he’d heard evidence that Lorimer Davis’s theory was correct. He felt almost nauseated from the chilling revelation that his father had considered selling Somerset to ensure his safe return in case of war. Good God, what an appalling, unthinkable idea! He knew his father loved him—too much, he’d thought at times—but sell Somerset? To appease an imagined curse? Thank God his mother had made him see the ridiculousness of it.
Thomas sat down in his room, stunned from the proof he’d heard tonight that certain rumors drifting to him over the years had a basis of truth. Threads of gossip, innuendos, whispers, vaguely familiar names, together with his own impressions and knowledge of family history, began to weave into a sort of decipherable tapestry. He had never questioned the love between his mother and father, but there had been intimations that their marriage had been arranged. His powerful grandfather, Carson Wyndham, had been involved, and money had traded hands between him and Silas Toliver back in South Carolina. The transaction had required that his father abandon the woman he was to wed in exchange for the money to buy his plantation in Texas.
Only wisps of such hearsay had ever reached Thomas’s ears, and he’d never been curious enough to wonder or ask about their foundation. But evidently there had been another woman in his father’s life: this Lettie he’d mentioned tonight. Wasn’t she the wife of his brother, Morris? Was she the sacrifice his father had spoken of? Apparently the deal he’d made with the devil had been with the wealthy man who became his father-in-law. Was it true that Carson Wyndham had paid Silas Toliver to marry his daughter? Why? To prevent her from entering a convent? And had his father in fact used the money to bankroll Somerset?
Thomas remembered his “Willowshire” grandparents well—especially his imposing grandfather—even from their one short visit long ago. The only reunion with his mother’s parents had been strained. Thomas recalled a contract-burning ceremony that had set his father’s teeth on edge, and his parents had not been sad to see them go. He knew very little of the “Queenscrown” side of the family. There was a grandmother named Elizabeth who wrote occasionally, but she had never come to see them or they her. He knew there was an uncle called Morris, and once he’d heard the name Lettie mentioned whom Thomas assumed to be his wife, but his parents did not discuss them in his presence.
Thomas now had a fair understanding of why his grandmother had prophesied that a curse would fall on her son’s land, but how could his father give a rational, intelligent thought to it? Did he really think Joshua’s death or his mother’s failure to carry children were punishments from God for whatever deal he had struck over twenty-five years ago? Or that his son’s death would be God’s final stroke of vengeance? Sheer nonsense! If there was a war, Thomas would go. In what capacity he would serve was another matter. In February, the lieutenant governor of Texas had authorized a committee for public safety to recruit volunteers, but he and Jeremy Jr. and Armand, Stephen, and Philippe (Robert suffered from bronchitis severe enough to preclude war service) had already decided to wait and join the regiment formed that would best defend Texas.
And, yes, he could be killed, and there would be no heir to take over Somerset, but he’d already decided on a solution to defray that possibility. He’d planned to talk to his parents tomorrow about proposing to Priscilla Woodward. He and Priscilla had known each other since her father had hung up his shingle as one of the town’s two physicians ten years ago, and he’d courted her for one.
Thomas had been waiting to feel for her what she clearly and unabashedly felt for him, but while he liked her and enjoyed her company, something that he could not put his finger on was missing. She was the prettiest girl in town, with bouncy golden curls and sparkling blue eyes, and she exuded a buoyancy good for his more serious nature. She was a little too impressed with his house on Houston Avenue and his link to English royalty, but he could understand it. Priscilla had grown up in a modest house still home to her two older brothers, who worked as lumberjacks for the Warwick Lumber Company. Meals in the Woodward house consisted of meat and potatoes, eaten at the kitchen table with her brothers still in their work clothes, shirt sleeves rolled up. Mrs. Woodward’s finest possession was an English bone china tea set. Priscilla wasn’t ashamed of her upbringing—Thomas couldn’t have gone with that—but she appreciated the refinements of his home and lifestyle and that was all right with him.
The idea of marrying her had gradually formed when the same realization hit him that had deeply troubled his father. If he should die, what would become of Somerset when his father passed on? The idea of the plantation passing out of Toliver hands was abominable to him. It must not happen, and Priscilla Woodward was the resolution. He would marry her, and they would begin a family right away. He was almost twenty-four. It was time he tied the knot, became a father. He felt much better now about the fact that he did not feel as deeply for his future wife as he would have liked. He had deduced from his parents’ conversation tonight that his father had not loved his mother either when they first married, and yet, here the old boy was at his age proving to her he did.
Somewhat at ease, Thomas crawled back into bed for another hour’s sleep before the sun fully rose. When he awoke, the news had been telegraphed to the community that Confederate forces had—at the exact hour Silas had cried out in his sleep—fired upon the federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The War Between the States had begun.